Posted by automatedlady on June 3, 2002, at 18:30:51
Hi
It's late, I'm wide awake, so I thought I'd ask if anyone else is experiencing/has experienced what I am at the moment..Up until the age of 18 I was anxious and very unhappy at times, but I was basically contented with who I was and the life I was living. I had friends, hobbies, hope for the future, I thought I was okay as a person (a lot of the time).
Then, at 18 (shortly after I went to uni) I became seriously depressed. I stopped seeing the friends I had (I became convinced I wasn't worth knowing and was too scared of them rejecting me), I didn't know how to make any more. I stopped working, hardly left my room, spent most of my time crying, self-harming, bingeing on food and sleeping. This went on (with a few drug-fuelled attempts at being my "old self" again) until I was 20, at which point I left uni, totally stopped drinking/taking drugs and tried to get help. I thought that things would get better because I was willing to change.Four years later, things have NOT got better. I have never stopped feeling like i am not worth knowing. I have never regained my ability to work or socialise, I have never got back my hobbies. Basically, I have felt like my life is over since I was 20.
And I can't stop dwelling on what I used to have and comparing it to what I have now. I feel that I am ugly now, old, fat and worthless now, and that I will never have the kind of life I had before again. I feel like I have wasted the past four years of my life and I am terrified I will never remember how to be happy. You Americans may think this is a bit sad, but it's a big party night here in Britain and I spent the night in watching TV because I was frightened that if I went out (I am living in my home town at the moment) I might bump into someone I haven't seen since I was 18 and they'd look at me and think how old and fat I look now...
It all sounds totally trivial, but I can't stop the thoughts (and the feelings that come with them). I know that if I was happier with my present I wouldn't obsess about the past so much. And if I didn't obsess about the past so much I'd actually be ABLE to make something of my present. This kind of thinking is less of a problem for me when I'm on SSRIs, but on SSRIs I just become totally unmotivated and don't even care that my life is empty (my doctor won't put me on anything else because he doesn't think my problems warrant that).
So anyway. It is a relief to write this down here. I think because I haven't had any obviously self-destructive habits in the past few years (don't take drugs or self harm anymore and to an outsider I probably just look like I'm a bit of a loner and don't really care enough about things to turn up to them) people (like my family/doctor) don't think there's anything wrong with me. I feel like there's only so long you can keep crying to people about the same things so I don't do it any more. I kind of limp along, basically. I feel about 50% alive. I sometimes fantasise about returning to self harm or drugs, or attempting suicide, because that way at least something might change, I might get help. But I won't (at the moment) risk losing the things I do have that just about keep me going.
There will probably be people who read this (if they get this far...) who think at least I'm not in a major depression, and I agree, I'm lucky that I'm not far worse than I am. Doesn't really help though...
Anyone want to reply, would be really grateful...
AL
poster:automatedlady
thread:25008
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020531/msgs/25008.html